Part of the Wiley and Putnam’s highly influential Library of American
Books, Simms’s two-volume Views and
Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction, shows the author
theorizing the “American” aspects of American literature, as well as the
relationship between America’s history and its imaginative writing. In this, we can see Simms presenting and
promoting the cultural agenda of the “Young America” movement, whose members
included Melville, Poe, and Hawthorne. Views and Reviews is thus a central text
in understanding the struggle for defining American literature ...